From the 19th century onwards, among English jewelers, for example, part of the luxury industry focused on the mass distribution of products for the general public. 2 A luxury product represents, above all, a label of quality: the buyer knows in advance that it has been produced thanks to the state-of-the-art expertise of a profession and is therefore willing to pay for the quality of such a product.

Luxury has not always been seen as a remarkable economic stimulant: in 18th-century France, it was generally the cause of several ills, such as increasing at the expense of the basic needs of the poor or fostering the corruption of morals, particularly those of the young. Nevertheless, Paris acquired from this time a reputation as the “capital of luxury” even if this reputation was not appreciated by everyone: “That luxury, growing every day, begins to become an expensive and unsustainable custom in the world that invented it, that it is from here [Paris] that it spreads throughout Europe…” (Massillon, Panegyric of Saint Louis). Around a few great couturiers, perfumers and industrialists3, the constitution of large groups in the luxury industry was nevertheless carried out in France4 around the 1990s and today, luxury remains a dynamic and growing field5. With the formation of these entities, luxury, formed for half of the fashion sector, has shown an average annual growth of 5% per year for more than three decades